Duke Law and the 2012-2013 Supreme Court term

June 28, 2013Duke Law News

A Duke Law professor’s leadership of a team that wrote the only amicus brief cited in a landmark Supreme Court opinion was one example of faculty engagement with the 2012-2013 term. Duke Law faculty filed amicus briefs, offered commentary and media analysis, and otherwise informed the Court through their scholarship.

Informing the Court’s opinion

Professor Ernest Young and his co-authors, including Erin Blondel ’09, filed the only amicus brief cited in the court’s majority opinion on United States v. Windsor, which found the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional. Young and his co-authors filed a federalism-based argument against the constitutionality of the act.

"Justice Kennedy's majority singled out our brief among the many dozens of amici in the case for citation, and many of the arguments in his opinion tracked arguments and examples in our brief," said Young, the Alston & Bird Professor of Law and a leading constitutional law scholar.

Deborah DeMott, the David F. Cavers Professor of Law, who served as the sole reporter for the American Law Institute’s Restatement (Third) of Agency, noted its prominent citation in the Court’s rulings in both Hollingsworth v. Perry and Vance v. Ball State University, issued during the last week of the term. In his majority opinion in Hollingsworth, Chief Justice John Roberts quoted the amicus brief filed by Walter Dellinger, the Douglas B. Maggs Professor Emeritus of Law, filed in support of the respondents on the issue of standing.

The chief justice cited an article by Professor Marin Levy in his dissent to the opinion issued in Arlington v. FCC.

Analyzing the arguments and results

Several Duke Law professors provided commentary and media analysis regarding the arguments and opinions from major cases heard by the court.

Guy-Uriel Charles, the Charles S. Rhyne Professor of Law, co- authored an essay in the Yale Law Journal, mapping a contingency plan in the event that the court invalidated provisions of the Voting Rights Act as a result of Shelby County v. Holder. The court did just that, and Charles appeared in television and print stories explaining the effect of the decision on voting rights in states with a history of voter suppression.

Charles, the founding Director of the Center on Law, Race and Politics, also served as a resource for media members parsing the court’s ruling in Fisher v. Texas, a case reviewing the University of Texas’s affirmative action policy.

Young’s amicus brief was a topic of interest for media, and he was a frequent commenter after the March oral arguments in the DOMA case, and again after the Court’s June 26 ruling.

Young and Professor Neil Siegel, who has focused much of his scholarly research and public commentary on the Supreme Court, helped to analyze and explain the ramifications of the court’s decisions in the Windsor and Hollingsworth cases, which involve a morass of sometimes conflicting state local laws that apply to same-sex couples seeking official recognition for various official and legal purposes.